…I’ll cite the South African submission to the International Court of Justice, from page 59 to page 69, section D, titled “Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others”.
Proving intent has always been the hardest part of proving a genocide is taking place. In this case? They just tweeted it out.
Which doesn’t make them a legitimate target.
From a few days ago: Dana Yaghy from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, was killed during the IDF bombing campaign.
Along with forty members of her family.
Entire generations of families have been wiped out during the war. From Time in October, “47 families—consisting of over 500 civilians—were wiped from the civil registry.”
The article was from October the 31st. There are so many more families that have been completely wiped out since then.
There are 2.2 million people in Gaza.
1.9 million of them have been forced from their homes. Most won’t have a home to return too: either it was destroyed during the bombing campaign, blown up by controlled explosives, knocked over by bulldozers, or burnt to the ground by IDF soldiers.
1.5 million of those people have been forced from the north, forced from central Gaza, right up to the border, most forced to live in tent cities in and around Rafah.
And Israel have declared that they are holding off their attack on Rafah until March, so that it coincides with Ramadan.
Gaza doesn’t have a healthcare system any more. 24 out of 36 hospitals have been shut down. Many of those hospitals that were shut down have now been completely destroyed. The remaining hospitals are on life support: barely able to offer any services at all with medical equipment and supplies not coming in through the border due to the siege, and everywhere is working significantly over capacity.
In the north of Gaza they are experiencing famine. Many children have already died from starvation. Some are boiling grass and leaves to eat, having used up the supply of animal feed. Aid convoys to the north were suspended a few weeks ago because the IDF fired on a convoy, and when they attempted to restart convoys a few days ago they immediately had to suspend them again because the security situation had deteriorated to the point where it is no longer safe.
No food can get to the north of Gaza. Fields have been razed. This is a death sentence.
And for the rest of Gaza, the siege is taking its toll. Starvation, disease, infection. Israel is only allowing a tiny fraction of the aid needed into Gaza. Israel have allowed protests to continue that have blocked one of the border crossings. Even if the siege were lifted today, humanitarian experts believe that thousands of people would still die of preventable causes. And if the siege isn’t lifted? Excess deaths will be in the hundreds of thousands.
South Africa took a case to the International Court of Justice, “alleging that Israel is responsible for violations of the Genocide Convention”, the submission I’ve linked to earlier in this post. The court, by majority vote, said:
So when you argue that this isn’t a genocide: I’d like you to explain to us how the things I’ve described are not genocidal. We call the Bosnian genocide a genocide, yet the numbers in that genocide are a mere fraction of what we are observing in Gaza.
So make your case.